SPIRO: Can Cheika and Larkham get on and coach the Wallabies together?

On Friday the ARU issued a statement regarding the upcoming Rugby World Cup that surprised no one.

Stephen Larkham was going to be the Wallabies backs coach through to the end of the tournament and Nathan Grey was going to be the permanent Wallabies defence coach at the end of the 2015 Super Rugby tournament.

Grey was an assistant coach on the Wallabies tour of Europe last year, a tour that resulted in some extremely disappointing performances.

Larkham was one of the greatest backs in the history of rugby. He was a runner, passer and tackler, not a kicking number 10.

In the 1999 RWC tournament, under the coaching regime of Rod Macqueen, Larkham made the most number of tackles on any back. He also drop-kicked the goal to beat the Springboks in extra-time to take the Wallabies through to the final.

In the final, Larkham orchestrated the Wallabies play against France to create one of the only two conclusive World Cup victories. The first conclusive victory was in 1987 when France, once again, were comfortably defeated by the All Blacks.

Towards the end of his career, Larkham was forced by the then Wallabies coach to become more of a kicking number 10, in the traditional Queensland manner. This did not sit well with him. It is noticeable as a coach of the Brumbies that he has taken the box kick out of Nic White’s game.

This fits in well with Michael Cheika’s passion for the ball-in-hand game that worked so well for the Waratahs last season.

I do not see any conflict between Cheika and Larkham, therefore, on philosophical grounds. But is there a potential conflict between the two in which backs can best play the ball-in-hand game for the Wallabies?

Cheika is strong-willed and opinionated. This is a good thing in a coach. The best coaches need to have a certain confidence in their selection and coaching talents. He is also extremely loyal to his players, as his defence of Kurtley Beale during the controversy over his inappropriate behaviour towards Di Patston at the end of last season indicates.

Larkham, too, is strong-willed and opinionated. After the Reds defeat by the Brumbies in the opening round of Super Rugby this year, Larkham rather pointedly stated that the ‘Reds are not up to standard’ to explain the Brumbies six tries and record winning margin.

He is, also like Cheika, loyal to his players. As the Brumbies assistant coach under Jake White he once argued that the entire Brumbies backline deserved to start for the Wallabies.

It is entirely possible that these loyalties will be tested when it comes to selecting the Wallabies fly half-inside centre combination.

Cheika has developed a terrific combination out of Bernard Foley and Kurtley Beale for the Waratahs.

Larkham is developing an alternative and terrific combination out of Matt Toomua and Christian Leali’ifano.

With Leali’ifano now kicking goals more accurately than he did last season, the need for Foley as a starter and the main goal-kicker is less acute than it was.

Presumably, James O’Connor will regain a position on the wing for the tournament – he will never play fly half again for the Wallabies – and if this happens, he will provide another alternative to Foley as the front-line goal kicker.

I was underwhelmed with O’Connor at number 10 for the Reds against the Highlanders. He made a searing break early on. But nothing came of it – no try was scored because he couldn’t link up with any runner.

This inability to put runners into gaps with his passing and his penchant to take the line on most of the time indicate that he is a soloist rather than the leader of the orchestra, in rugby terms.

I cannot believe that coach Richard Graham actually believes that O’Connor looked good at fly half.

The point about all this, anyway, is that Larkham – because he is the assistant – could well have to back down or acquiesce in some of Cheika’s selection, even though he disagrees with them.

Splits like this, around players and tactics, are common in even the best coaching panels. Often this is a creative friction. Sometimes, though, it leads to the creation of only friction.

During the 2007 Rugby World Cup tournament, the All Blacks fielded a different team in every match and, famously, lost to France in the quarter-final. The talk in New Zealand rugby at the time was that the coach Graham Henry was not clear in his mind what his best side was.

Steve Hansen, the talk maintains, was allowed to pick the quarter final side and Henry reserved the right to select the (superfluous, at it happens) semi-final and final sides.

It is interesting in the light of this talk that one of the first major decisions Hansen took when he became coach of the All Blacks was to bring in Grant Fox, a champion in the 1987 champion All Blacks side, as a selector only.

I think that a similar sort of system, a father figure type who is not currently coaching, needs to be brought into the Wallabies camp. And there is an obvious candidate for this job – Rod Macqueen.

Also, Macqueen could fulfil the sort of role that Wayne Smith has been asked to do with the All Blacks, namely to create ideas for attack out of defence.

In my long career as a writer on rugby, having picked the brains of rugby men from Danie Craven down, I can say that the most interesting and constructive thinker about rugby has been Macqueen.

The Brumbies camp was a honey pot for coaches from around the world when Macqueen was creating the Brumbies game there.

I am not predicting splits in the ranks of the Wallabies coaching staff, even though some strong-willed characters are involved. But all organisations need someone who has the personality and the wisdom, like the Japanese concept of the corner man who anyone can go to to test out ideas, to keep the group working towards a common cause, rather than in different individual streams.

Macqueen is that man for the Wallabies.

Watching the performances of the Australian teams in the last round, admittedly the Waratahs were not playing, brought to the fore the need for some new thinking on attack play.

The Australian teams do not have much of a notion, willingness or a system of running the ball back from long kicks into their territory. Yet the key to winning big matches in the modern era, I would argue, is for teams to exploit broken play opportunities when the defences are not set.

Mike Harris for the Rebels ran back a couple of kicks and then showed, with some sloppy passing, why NZ rugby did not panic when he left his native shores.

Compare the Australian teams with the Highlanders, the Hurricanes and the Chiefs, three teams that are often lethal with the way they run back kicks.

The Crusaders and the Blues are the exception to this NZ practice. However, both these teams, especially the Crusaders, are poorly coached.

The template is really the other three NZ teams and it is a mystery to me why the Australian teams, with their excellent outside backs, aren’t copying their systems.

The point here is that the referees, from what I have seen this season, are tweaking the laws as they are wont to do to make it easier for sides to field the high ball.

The catcher in the air is now becoming sacred territory. He cannot be even touched, if the rulings in the Chiefs-Crusaders match are anything to go by. The old Bryan Habana trick of clattering the catcher in the air while pretending to try and catch the ball is out.

So why kick the ball away when it is easily caught?

Even the Bulls have twigged to this tweaking of the laws. They do fewer high balls kicks than in the past. Their impressive young halfback, Rudy Paige, passed brilliantly, short and long and did not kick in the Francois Hougaard manner.

I tipped the Sharks to beat the Bulls but had not taken into account the Bulls tremendous home record of losing only three of their last 21 home matches. They were unbeaten, too, at home in 2014. So whenever the Bulls are home from now on, I am tipping them to win.

Watching the Bulls-Sharks match at Pretoria, I reckoned the Bulls got all the 50-50 calls from the referee and/or the TMO. One Bulls try was clearly from a forward pass but deemed not obvious by the TMO, for instance. However, a disallowed Sharks try was overturned because of a not obvious Sharks knock-on.

The round indicated two teams that are unlikely to repeat their last season heroics – the Force and the Crusaders.

The Blues look likely to perform as poorly as they did last year. They lack a player who can take them around the field.

They also do not seem to be able to win away from Eden Park. They should have beaten the Cheetahs easily. The Blues only had to make 29 tackles in the match!

Even at the end, they had the ball just outside the Cheetahs 22 with only a few minutes of time left to play. Somehow they allowed the Cheetahs to get into the position to kick the winning penalty.

Then the Blues won the kick-off and got themselves back into a position where a drop goal was a formality. Needless to say the goal was missed.

The Rebels showed against the Brumbies that they are going to be a hard team to beat this season. Their comeback play towards the end of the match was not helped by rain making handling difficult. I like the way they are as aggressive on attack as they are on defence.

The Brumbies remain a team that is a title contender. They showed grit and a classic set-piece try scored by Tevita Kuridrani, which was the difference between the sides.

The Chiefs were most impressive in the way they crushed the Crusaders and reduced them to the sort of inept play with which the Chiefs, in the past and on bad days, frequently tormented their supporters.

The Chiefs, it seems to me, have the best coaching in the tournament. Some weeks ago I read in the New Zealand Herald that they have a big screen on their training ground. They can watch training plays in re-runs to see if the systems worked the way they should.

The way the Chiefs dismantled the Crusaders defensive systems reflected the value of this training device, it seemed to me.

I was intriqued to read in Danny Weidler’s column in The Sun-Herald that Des Hasler has just purchased a similar screen for the Bulldogs.

Presumably, this outdoor screen system will be standard equipment for the Australian Super Rugby teams and the Wallabies sooner rather than later.